"Is that to quit the frontend or MAME itself? For MAME you need to configure the buttons in the program itself, i.e. hit TAB."

yes but when i tab to set controls in mame, there is no option to quit or exit the emulator. the keyboard esc key exits but there is no whee to set that within mame itself, at least nothing that i see.

just to be clear, i'd like to be able to set the exit emulator to a button or button combo with a control pad. hitting that should exit whichever game you're playing and return you to a front end. in my case, i am running emulation station.

appreciate any feedback you might have squid and keep up the great work!

For Pi 2 only unfortunately. (binaries are optimized for it and the emulators used are heavier on resources)

--> he replaced MANY emulators with better versions, optimized some of them at source code level (PSX at 100% speed for instance), made some homemade pixel-shaders that give a CRT-like rendering which is really amazing (with no slowdown) - you all read about my complaints regarding MAME4all rendering - , added many emulators / platforms (PGM, fullspeed Amiga 1200, PSP, ScummVM, SegaCD/32X...). ATM "MAME" is kinda broken but the FBA build supported many arcade systems (like PGM !!).

It's meant to be used with an USB controller.

(I'm cross posting this in the pifba & mame4all thread)

He spent a couple of fulltime months doing this (12 hours a day or so). He has to get back to work so doesn't know if he'll be able to continue as he has to make a living (he is an independant game developer). I think if there is a huge response and if we support his work, he'll be able to spend some more time on it ; amazing stuff is planned for the future, I'm not sure I can share the information here Of course, source code will be released (it's on a repo right now I think) so improvements will eventually be backported to RetroPie.

BTW, please don't hesitate to tell me your remarks about the distro here. I don't want him to be flooded with questions, I'll filter them here (or on another dedicated thread).

Cheers !

Edit : he initially made this for a friend & himself. He needs to clean up the source code before making it available, please be patient

datajerk wrote:
E.g. if the native game resolution is 288x224 and my VGA output is set to 640x480, then resolution=320x240 fixes the problem and every game pixel is exactly 2 VGA pixels. mame4all will stretch the 320x240 over 640x480 but not stretch the 288x224 to 320x240. Instead I get the 288x224 pixel perfect with a small black boarder. I tested with VGA and composite capture devices using 342x256 for VGA (1024x768) and 360x228 for composite (720x576) output and got perfect results.

While I may not yet fully understand how the resolution setting works, it seems on my rig (and screen running at 1024 x 768) it behaves as follows:
- 320x240 causes a game to show up at 4x the original resolution - scanlines look really good; works perfectly for a.o. Metal Slug, Jungle King... but causes vertical games and wider games like Final Fight to go off-screen pretty badly (320x240 rotated looks like it'd be the deal for older vertical games, though)
- 640x480 causes game to run at 2x the original resolution (and adds huge black borders) - scanlines look bad; no games going off-screen, though
- 480x360 seems to be the equivalent of 3x - still too large black borders for horizontal games; scanlines are mostly fine
- 400x300 would be 3.5x then - looks like this would be the best setting for a somewhat wider game like Final Fight

Anyway, I guess what I'm getting at... Is there a way to pass a different resolution/settings file to mame4all when launching a single game? If not, I guess I'll resort to setting it back to auto (i.e. taking the setting out fully) and sticking with just anti-aliasing intead. If anything, this post might help someone else looking into (half-)integer scaling...

d8thstar wrote:"Is that to quit the frontend or MAME itself? For MAME you need to configure the buttons in the program itself, i.e. hit TAB."

yes but when i tab to set controls in mame, there is no option to quit or exit the emulator. the keyboard esc key exits but there is no whee to set that within mame itself, at least nothing that i see.

just to be clear, i'd like to be able to set the exit emulator to a button or button combo with a control pad. hitting that should exit whichever game you're playing and return you to a front end. in my case, i am running emulation station.

appreciate any feedback you might have squid and keep up the great work!

You can customize the quit button for the customize menu (can't remember exactly how it's worded), and that button also works to quit the emulator itself if the menu isn't currently up.

Mame4all works great except for one problem. It only displays out hdmi.

I installed the itontec 3.5 touch screen. It works great. Console and X work perfectly. But when I run mame4all, it always uses hdmi out.

I think this has to do with mame4all using dispmanx instead of framebuffer, but no matter how hard I look, I can't find settings either in mame4all or the pi for changing the dispmanx video out device.

When I exit mame4all, the pi goes right back to displaying on the touch screen again.

cyberbillp wrote:
How do I redirect mame4all video output to the touchscreen (fb1)?

Only option with dispmanx apps is something like fbcp but that will hurt performance.
The use of dispmanx of mame4all makes things much faster but will only support gpu driven displays (hdmi, composite, dpi, dsi).
You may be better off using a mame port that doesn't have dispmanx acceleration.

cyberbillp wrote:Thanks. Do you have any replacement Mame suggestions?

I believe many of the 'SD Card Images' use similar back ends but could be worth trying them, if not, AdvMAME works well but its performace is inferior. You would be restricted to early 90s Titles and before.

Here is a small blog on some improvements, mainly
- fix on sound lag / skipping
- option for filling the complete display
- option for pixel aspect ratio
- bring down cpu from 98% to 10-15% on a Pi2 with Ms Pac-man

hicksonj wrote:Sound latency problem
This problem has been driving me nuts on mame4all-pi. When an emulation session first starts, there is hardly any latency (delay) in sound vs. video. However after about 2 minutes the latency starts to increase until there is nearly 1 second latency. (this is for 8-bit 80s games).